


come on, mess me up (you know i want it)

by supercutegeeks



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 05:12:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14784185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supercutegeeks/pseuds/supercutegeeks
Summary: it's a scary way to be brave, but it's a good thing to be brave for.four kisses, or how gamora lets some love in. gamora's pov; set in the years before infinity war.





	come on, mess me up (you know i want it)

The first time you kiss Peter, you count exactly three seconds and then pull away.

It’s how you learned to do it. When you take a step away from him and his eyes drift lazily open, glistening, you don’t tell him that it’s the first time you’ve kissed someone because you wanted to. You don’t tell him that you learned to kiss with assassination targets, that you learned how to use yourself like that when you were fifteen. You don’t say anything. 

You kiss him for three seconds because it’s not against the rules, not yet. These weren’t Thanos’ rules; he couldn’t have given less of a damn as long as you got the job done and stayed pretty, but they’re yours and they’ve worked so far. It was never hard to keep it to three seconds with the marks, the slimy politicians or unwashed moguls. 

No, the three-second rule started when you were seventeen. You thought you were taking down an ambassador, but it was his daughter. Her name was Elzira; she had long, pink hair and smiled like she knew how beautiful she was but didn’t care. 

Recon lasted a week. You met her on Sunday, in a fresh-air market. On Tuesday, you got drinks together and she curled her tongue around the straw. On Wednesday, very early in the morning, you woke up on her couch. Friday, you were talking in her bedroom. By the end of your dizzying Saturday kiss, you almost couldn’t bear to pull the trigger.

Almost. But you did it anyway. And you made your rule. Three seconds prevents accidents, prevents regret. Maintains control. That’s the important thing.

You kiss him for three seconds and then he says Hey. Which is decidedly un-poetic, but that’s not what you’re worried about.

“Was that okay,” you rush out in one quick breath. You are always aware of your body and right now you’re ready to run, if necessary. If not, well, you don’t know if you’re ready for that.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, it was totally okay.” 

He puts his hands on your hips and the tension melts away. You can feel his fingertips through your shirt, feel them press firm enough so you’ll know he wants you to stay. Or, at least, you’d like to think that’s what he means. 

It’s terrifying what he can do to you; it’s all too easy. You think there must be some price. You feel like a hunted deer, wandering through a forest laden with traps. It’s a vulnerability you can’t quite remember the beginning of, but it seems that it’s here to stay, because despite the knowledge of what lays ahead, you step forward. And despite every history telling you no, when he asks if you can do it again, you lean in. 

/

The fifth time you kiss Peter, you cry. You’re pretty sure he notices, because to kiss, of course, you must be very, very close. But maybe not; Peter can be fairly oblivious, and you are anything but obvious. It’s another skill you’d learned, long enough ago that it’s second nature now: the delicate way to cry invisibly.

You pull away and blink: it’s then that you realize you’d been crying. Peter had pushed you against the kitchen counter in a way that had left you a little breathless. You glance up at him, and he’s got that awestruck look again like the last four times you’d kissed. You don’t understand that look, and you understand even less when he drops his head to your shoulder and murmurs something into your skin that you can’t make out. 

He then turns bright red and scurries out of the room, making some half-hearted excuse about repairs, and you’re left quite dazed. Although fluent in twenty-seven languages, you’re still trying to figure out Peter’s own, so maybe you’re not as focused as you usually are when Drax comes into the kitchen to heat up his pizza rolls, of all things.

“Gamora,” he says, because of course Drax, who couldn’t read between the lines if you connected the dots for him, immediately notices the single tear remaining underneath your eye. “Are you okay? Did Quill hurt you?”

“No, I–”

“I’ll kill him,” Drax says, his voice sounding alarmingly serious, especially when combined with the lunge he makes for a nearby frying pan.

“No,” you say, “he didn’t do anything.”

“Thank gods. I really didn’t want to have to kill him. But I would have.”

“I’m fine… I just…”

“Had some emotional trouble? Probably because of all the kissing you’ve been doing?”

“Drax,” you say, your face flushing just as Peter’s had, and you forget too often that he’s not only a warrior but a husband and a father, still. 

“You’re a strong woman, Gamora,” Drax says as the microwave beeps. “You can conquer anything you come up against. Romance should be no obstacle for a fearsome warrior such as yourself. You must simply talk to Quill.”

“Thanks, Drax.” Leave it to him to simultaneously validate and scare the living hell out of you.

“Anytime,” he replies, his mouth already half-full with pizza rolls as he leaves.

You want to talk to Peter, because if there’s anyone you want to work out the occasionally frightening and often sad workings of your mind with, it’s him. But, also, and maybe more so, you don’t want to talk to Peter, because he’s everything you stand to lose.

Luckily, the decision is made for you, because Peter is waiting for you outside your quarters in his signature “act casual” pose that’s so forced it almost makes you crack a grin.

“Hey Gamora,” he says, his hand slipping down the doorframe as soon as he sees you approach. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“You’re standing in the door to my room. It’s not much of a ‘fancy’ that I would be here as well. I live here.”

Peter sighs. “It’s an expression, I was being sarcas–” You raise an eyebrow. “–tic. Oh. You got it. You were also–” 

“Being sarcastic,” you finish.

He smiles nervously. The exchange loosens your nerves a little; it’s a nice reminder of how far you’ve come, that even with palpable tension between the two of you there is room to joke. To be comfortable.

“Come in,” you say, brushing past him to sit down on your bed. 

You’ve been living on the ship–it no longer seems just Peter’s ship but you’re hesitant to claim it as your own–for a year now. It was strange, at first, to have a place to call your own. You don’t remember your childhood home, and you’d lived in barracks after Thanos had kidnapped you. The most decoration you’d been allowed were your knives, and Nebula shared your room, which occasionally necessitated sleeping with a proverbial eye open. Those were the good nights: worse were the ones when Nebula was too weak to do anything but cry and you had to lie there, listening.

But that is over now, and Peter had cleared you your own room, though Drax, Rocket, and Groot had to share, and mumbled something about courtesy. You’d slowly been filling it with things: your sword, of course; a red lantern you’d bought one celebratory night; clothes, now that you were allowed more of them. A few books, despite the holo-tablets, because you remembered your mother teaching you to read with printed books. It made you wistfully nostalgic, though it was impossible to find any books in your native tongue. And your favorite, the colorful printed photographs from an old Terran camera Peter had been overjoyed to discover. Polaroids, he’d called them.

Peter stands next to your row of photos now, and shifts his feet nervously.

“What did you want to talk about?” you ask, years of practice concealing even the hint of a quiver from your voice. 

“Well, uh, you know, when we kissed, earlier, I, um, said something, and I think you might’ve heard, and I didn’t mean to say it and you don’t have to say it back or say anything I just wanted to say sorry ‘cause I feel like I put you in a position that you weren’t ready for–”

“What did you say?” Your voice is soft.

“–or were, y’know, uncomfortable with, and look, maybe we should just forget it–”

“Peter,” you say, coming back to yourself and speaking up, “what did you say?”

“Oh.” His face flushes bright red and he leans back against your dresser. “You didn’t hear. Well, shit, I feel like an idiot now.”

“Peter, whatever it is, just tell me.” You shift forward on your bed and try to sound gentle.

“I said, um, I said, I love you?”

He phrases it like a question, but his body settles and his eyes widen slightly, earnestly. You have been able to read body language excellently since you were eleven, even before you learned kissing as a tool. You can tell he is sincere, and it triggers something confusing in you. 

If you thought you were terrified before, when you kissed, then you have no words for the fear you feel now. It’s not the kind of fear you’d grown up with, not the fear of Thanos’ cold smirk or the fear of your first firefight. No, this fear is bigger.

It’s something unfurling in your chest, pushing away whatever used to live there. It’s twisting your heart but, at the same time, making room for you to breathe. It’s birds, taking flight from your throat, or a sea, roiling in your bones. 

Not the fear of the day your homeworld perished but of the day after, when you saw the cosmos for the first time and realized you were part of it. You are filled with the sensation, suddenly, of being on the edge of something sublime, capital-A Awesome, something that could destroy you or save you, and you realize you want to leap.

“Oh,” you say dumbly. 

“Yeah. So, like I said, if you want to just ignore it, we can. ‘S fine, I don’t even know what I was thinking.”

You stand up, then, very close to him. If you were to cry now, there’s no way he wouldn’t notice it, the way he’s looking at you.

“Did you mean it?”

“Well…”

“Peter.”

“Yes, I meant it.” His words come out in a rush again, and even though it’s annoying, often, and has gotten him punched in the face more times than you can count, you’ve always admired his honesty. “I meant it. I love you.”

The words sound foreign to you, rattling through your ears like one of Peter’s Terran songs.

“Peter–” you start.

“You don’t have to say it back,” he interrupts you.

“Let me finish.” These things are hard for you to say, and if you don’t do it now, who knows how long it might take. “I care about you very much. I want to–I want to do this with you.” You drop your hand down and intertwine your fingers with his. “I am afraid, sometimes, and I’m sorry, but I want to. More than anything.”

He grins, bashfully, ducks his head down to touch his forehead to yours. You let him. You breathe: in, then out. Something is beginning.

/

The twelfth time you kiss Peter, you’re about to have lunch with Nebula. It seems absurd that the two of you do that now, have lunch. It’s something normal sisters might do, sisters who live across town and try to catch up every couple of weeks, who had their fair share of fights as children but always stand up for each other. Not sisters who are also assassins who also spent their youth trying to kill each other after being kidnapped by a Titan tyrant.

But you are trying to be better, to people and about things, so you make sure to call Nebula every now and then. You know it is lonely, ricocheting in space.

“Did you just kiss him?” Nebula asks the minute you step out of earshot from the ship.

“What gave it away,” you say dryly. “Our lips touching?”

“Gamora.”

“Yes, I just kissed him. We have been kissing each other for a while.”

Nebula is silent, digesting the information for the time it takes you to reach the restaurant and order.

“How can you do it?” she asks, pushing the condiments around with her spoon. She refuses to meet your eye.

“Kiss him? Well, he actually chews a lot of gum, so–”

“No, not kiss him. You know what I mean. Open yourself up like that. Let him in.”

You consider this for a second. Nebula does not particularly care about Peter one way or another. But she is nervous in a way you rarely see her. Even when she was flying a spaceship directly at your face, Nebula was not nervous. 

Now, though, she stares intently at the spilled salt, her dark eyes intermittently flicking up to gauge your reaction.

“It took time. We had to be very patient with each other. But I guess, in the end, I didn’t want to keep denying myself things. It surprised me, to feel this way about Peter, although it happened slowly.”

Nebula nods, slowly.

“I suppose I want to heal. I want to be braver about who and how I–how I love. Otherwise he may as well have won already.” You do not name Thanos in your conversations with Nebula, but she always knows when you speak of him, the shadow neither of you can fully shake.

“That’s a scary way to be brave,” Nebula says between bites of salad after the waiter has brought your food.

“But it’s a good thing to be brave for.”

You walk a little after lunch, window-shopping and talking about where Nebula is headed next, about jobs you’ve had recently and places you think she’d like.

There are so many lives you have lost, you think when it is time for you to go. Not only your first life, the one your parents wanted for you, but the one Nebula deserved, too. The one where she was your sister and you acted like it.

You are halfway up the ramp of your ship when she calls your name, Gamora, and you turn. She beckons awkwardly, and you return, confused until you reach the bottom. 

Nebula, your younger sister, wraps her arms around you in a gentle if hesitant hug, like she doesn’t trust herself not to do harm. But the very fact of it, inconceivable but a year ago, gives you hope. You have lost lives, yes, but you have this one.

/

“I love you too, you know,” you finally say. It is after the twenty-third, no, maybe twenty-fourth, time you kiss Peter. You are lying next to him on your tiny bed, pressed up so you can feel his every heartbeat. You feel young, suddenly, much younger than you are. This is the first time you have fallen in love.

“Yeah,” Peter says, and you can hear the grin in his voice. “I know.”

There is much more you could say. Since the first time you kissed him, your cells have been singing. There is a new kind of rhythm in your marrow, something that makes you want to cry, or mostly laugh. You smile often, more than you even thought was possible. You’d started to think it was drilled out of you, but when Peter runs his hands over your shoulders as he steps by you absentmindedly, or calls you to share the earbuds with him because he’s found a song he thinks you’ll just get, you find yourself happy. Simply. You dance and your feet rarely stumble.

There is much more you could say. But there are hundreds of stars arching their path beyond the window above you, and Peter is warm beside you, and you do not have to say it now. There is time enough for it all.

**Author's Note:**

> if you couldn't tell, infinity war was a devastation and a half for me :( it rly got me to love gamora's character though & i think her dynamic with peter is pretty healthy & compelling (esp. for a canon mcu romance lol) so yeah! here you go!
> 
> title's from "come on mess me up" by cub sport. 
> 
> you can find me on tumblr @osufjan!


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